The Seven-Year Itch

June 2008 absolutely seems like a good time to start going after Osama bin Laden.

President George W Bush has enlisted British special forces in a final attempt to capture Osama Bin Laden before he leaves the White House.

Defence and intelligence sources in Washington and London confirmed that a renewed hunt was on for the leader of the September 11 attacks. “If he [Bush] can say he has killed Saddam Hussein and captured Bin Laden, he can claim to have left the world a safer place,” said a US intelligence source.

This could have been something to do when, I don't know, he was pinned down in caves in the Tora Bora Mountains while W. had visions of shock and awe in Iraq dancing in his head. To do it now as purely a legacy maneuver seems, how can I say this, completely self-serving and weak.

Additionally, this becomes easier when you don't spend years torturing and beating innocent Afghanis and Pakistanis when you could have been seeking the actual target.

American soldiers herded the detainees into holding pens of razor-sharp concertina wire, the kind that's used to corral livestock.

The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling.

Former guards and detainees whom McClatchy interviewed said Bagram was a center of systematic brutality for at least 20 months, starting in late 2001. Yet the soldiers responsible have escaped serious punishment [...]

Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said.

When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.

According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government.

This would tend to make the type of people you'd rely on in a mission to capture or kill bin Laden a tad more wary of you.

While it may be true that Al Qaeda as an organization is wearing out its welcome in the world, the best way to hasten that decline is to not torture innocent Muslim and occupy Muslim countries while letting the man that moderate Muslims view responsible for murdering thousands of Muslims in his own right to roam free. Our terror strategy is a failure, but fortunately so is Al Qaeda's. Still, Bush appears to be doing all he can to keep it relevant.